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The two storehouses on the lawn seemed to belong to one family, whose labor alone had prepared them; certainly they were the property of the sapsuckers. But the bird world, like the human, has its spoilers.
"They've made non-commish out o' them sapsuckers. Why, I wouldn't let them do nothin' but dig ditches when I was in command o' the regiment. But they probably had to take them. All the decent material was gone. How much bounty'd you get?" "We got $27.50 apiece," answered Harry. "But we didn't care nothin' for the bounty. We " "Only $27.50 apiece. Holy smoke!
Swiftly come frost and rain, and when the April suns again quicken all the surrounding vegetation into vigorous life, the victim of the sapsuckers stands lifeless, its branches reaching hopelessly upward, a naked mockery amid the warm green foliage around. Insects and fungi and lightning now set to work unhindered, and the tree falls at last, dust to dust ashes to ashes.
Often a single species or family will predominate, and one will remember "thrush days" or "woodpecker days." Yellow-bellied sapsuckers cross the path, flickers call and hammer in every grove, while in the orchards, and along the old worm-eaten fences, glimpses of red, white, and black show where redheaded woodpeckers are looping from trunk to post.
Day after day, flocks gathered and departed: by the time the first snow whitened his trail around the Limberlost, there were left only the little black-and-white juncos, the sapsuckers, yellow-hammers, a few patriarchs among the flaming cardinals, the blue jays, the crows, and the quail. Then Freckles began his wizard work. He cleared a space of swale, and twice a day he spread a birds' banquet.
A favorite place was the hindquarters of a gorgeous gilded deer that swung with the wind on the roof of the barn. So closely were they watched that the sapsuckers themselves were like old acquaintances before the babes in the woods began to make themselves heard. No sooner had these little folk found their voices than they made the woods fairly echo.
We carefully counted the different kinds on our farm, and every morning when we could steal a few minutes before breakfast after doing the chores, we visited the trees that had been wounded by the axe, to scrape off and enjoy the thick white delicious syrup that exuded from them, and gathered the nuts as they fell in the mellow Indian summer, making haste to get a fair share with the sapsuckers and squirrels.
Then in the fall come again the sapsuckers to the tree, remorselessly driving hole after hole through the still untouched segments of its circle of life. When the last sap-channel is pierced and no more can pass to the roots, the tree stands helpless, waiting for the end.
So it chanced that the Easter Day referred to came in the northern peninsula of Lower Michigan just when the buds upon the trees showed well defined against one of the bluest skies of all the world, when the teeming currents of the creeks were lifting the ice, and the waters were becoming turbulent to the eye; when the sapsuckers and creeping birds were jubilant, and the honk of the wild goose was a passing thing; when, with the upspring of the rest of nature, the trees threw off their lethargy, and through the rugged maples the sap began to course again.
"Yes, indeed," answered the Doctor; "all kinds of Woodpeckers are industrious workers, and all of them except the Sapsuckers are very useful to us in destroying hurtful insects." "What kind of eggs do they lay?" asked Dodo; "it must be hard to get a look at them in such deep holes so high up." "Very pretty ones indeed," replied the Doctor.
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